Monetizing a Gaming Product with Playstation’s Product Manager

How is gaming Product Management different from the conventional Product Management? How about monetizing gaming products? In the era of smart touch screen phones most of the games are free so where do gaming companies get money? Gaming product manager at Playstation gives insight to this modern field.

Gaming Product Manager at PlayStation

Matt Herrick is a gaming product manager focusing on the touchscreen. He has five years of Product Management experience working at gaming companies such as Playstation, Glu Mobile, and KIXEYE. He started his career at Facebook working on the Digital Chocolate game before smartphones came to the market, and currently, he works at PlayStation. Matt holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Communication.

How is monetizing gaming products different?

Being a Product Manager in gaming is a very different world. In a recent event, Matt Herrick discussed data analytics, A/B testing, the gaming ecosystem, and monetization strategies to help attendees better understand this industry.

He answered the question whether one needs to be a gamer to get into gaming product management and what’s tricky about the gaming industry. He also replied the audience’s questions about gaming Product Management.

Bullet points:

Even though it helps, you don’t need to be a gamer yourself to get into gaming product management. You just need to know what is fun for gamers.

A typical interview question for a gaming product manager role would be: “Why is Clash of Clans fun?”

As a gaming product manager, you need to know how to make money with free games.

You need to have a good product vision.

You have to be a great leader and lead your team to build the right things at the right time.

Data analysis is necessary even though most gaming companies are small and don’t have their own data scientist. You need to know, for example, how much money your customers are worth by day and how many people are converting into money spenders in your game.

Also, because the gaming companies are usually pretty small, as a gaming product manager, you have to do a lot of things that you don’t like doing.

Gaming product managers have to balance between limited budget, time and content while trying to create quality products. The challenge is creating something unique within limits mentioned above but at the same time something that the gamers can’t finish in three days and move on to the next game. The thing is to get them hooked and keep them coming back.